New York, Day Six
Today’s motivation was to go and visit the Google office in New York. As always, we crawled out of the hotel room shortly before noon with the children suffering from acute cabin fever, and Finnur from football/soccer fever. The subway ride went well, but when we got to the address in question we didn’t see a Google sign anywhere. We ended up asking a clothing store clerk where the Google office was and he told us it was in the building, but that we had to ask the security guard where to go.
Sure enough, once we were out of the elevator, the Google logo was everywhere. For some reason we’d gotten the address of the “satellite” office, so we moved across the street to the “real thing” (also not marked anywhere) and had lunch on the engineering floor. Bjarki sort of lost his mind in the cafeteria, he kept going back to the drink coolers to stroke the gleaming cans of Mountain Dew and Ginger Ale, and he was overall pretty unable to focus on eating. We’re not sure if his appetite is still so poor because of the pneumonia (thankfully, his crazy coughing fits seem to have vanished, except after he’s been running around) but he’s eating a lot less these days than usual.
Finnur asked for the location of one of his coworkers that he knew from New York, and he told us the really fancy cafeteria was on the 8th floor. So we headed up there, and boy was I glad we didn’t eat up there. Turns out there is a balcony there which I’m sure is great for eating, but the railing was not nearly high enough to stop parental heart-attacks.
Yes, I'm aware that it looks like Finnur and the kids are standing in front of a painted background picture, but no, this is the view from the Google cafeteria balcony.
A note on the door of the balcony had the only Google-marked document facing the outside world, as far as I could tell!
There's no denying this is a pretty sweet view to go along with lunch!
We were pretty high up. I was very glad Bjarki couldn't see the two garbage trucks, or he would have fought tooth and nail to see them even better!
Instead, him and Anna were completely besotted with a couple of watering cans and went around all the planters putting the can-stouts into specially made pipe-holes. Bjarki was SO MAD when we left the balcony, he would have been happy watering for a couple of hours more...
After our internal sight-seeing tour, we hopped on the subway for one stop and emerged close to the New York University (NYU) campus. This is the entrance to Washington Square Park.
I am going to assume that these sunbathers are all university students. Note the fences in the background. The entire park was Under Construction and therefore not very lovely to look at at all.
We walked to the center of the park, took a picture and then headed back out again. Not only was there no shade (it was another scorching day), but there was no playground! Epic fail!
Walking past an imposing red window-lacking building, which of course turned out to be a NYU library.
Suddenly we had landed on Broadway again, and from there it wasn't a long walk up to Union Square. On the way there, Mr. I-Want-To-Do-It-BY-MYSELF somehow fell asleep in the stroller. Such a thing hasn't happened in years!
We were infinitely relieved to find a playground at the north end of Union Square! Anna had been whining about it being warm, and her feet being tired, and could she have ice-cream, and ... you get the picture, but once we'd opened the playground gates, she was OFF! Meanwhile, us old folks got to sit down and peruse the internet for a bit using the magic phone.
Anna spent a long time on this spinning disc.
Anna pushing the disc...
This was an unusual playground, very heavy on the stainless-steel, in a funky kind of way.
The W hotel stood nearby.
One end of the playground had this awesome stainless-steel covered dome, with no stairs or anything to assist kids in getting up on top...
... but that of course didn't stop them in getting up there!
Anna with her friends du jour.
While the kids napped/played, I used the opportunity and went to a nearby giant Barnes and Noble bookstore to “buy water”. An hour later or so I emerged with a few kiddie-books for our collection, and one for myself. This may be the reason why the movers commented that we had “a lot of books”. 🙂
Around 6pm we went looking for a restaurant, and ended up at a rather fancy Italian one, perhaps somewhat out of desperation. We justified the cost by noting that we’d eaten lunch for free… During dinner the new books came in really handy because Bjarki didn’t want to stay still. The food was pretty good, but what was most striking was the avalanche of (mostly white) men in suits with big watches that appeared shortly after we’d ordered. It seemed pretty clear that this place is used to conduct “business”, and that most meals are probably paid for by some company or another. C’est la vie!
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